"The European Union as a 'Multiperspectival Polity'"

Abstract

[From the introduction]. This paper will argue that the EU has gradually evolved into a novel system of rule and regional governance where nation-states, while still holding the allegiance and loyalties of their populations and still acting in "self-interested" ways, nevertheless construct their identities and define their interests in different ways as member-states of the EU. The reason is that the EU, as a collective decision-making system, has had a significant and cumulative impact on the constituent national political systems which participate in this "partially formed polity" (and in many ways are "locked into" this process). Although the EU is frequently referred to as a collective decision-making system, my usage of the term is more specific: the EU is a system in the sense that it constitutes a new level of governance at the regional level ("above" but not "beyond the nation-state); the EU is a collectivity in the sense that both the supranational institutions and intergovernmental machinery linking the fifteen constituent national systems constitutes a "collectivity acting as a singularity" (Ruggie's term, 1993). It is this dimension of the "collectivity as a singularity" in particular which remains conceptually underdeveloped and weakly incorporated within existing regional integration theories.